On 2026-02-03 11:11:57 -0800 (-0800), Russ Allbery wrote: [...]
What nearly every free software project does in practice is make an assumption. That assumption goes roughly like this:You voluntarily submitted your work to my project and asked for it to be included, so I am going to assume that this means you agree to the standard conventions of free software and are okay with your work being included under the free software license that the work is already covered by. Asking you to confirm this explicitly is annoying and requires another back-and-forth, so I'm just going to assume we're all adults here and you wouldn't have sent me the patch if you didn't want me to use it.This is not legally rigorous, but it's also not *entirely* void of legal meaning either. There are a bunch of legal concepts sort of vaguely floating around in this area that have names like "promissary estoppel" that I am not even remotely qualified to analyze, but which roughly amount to a general informal principle that people are entitled to assume that you are a reasonable person and you mean what you are clearly implying. If you try to sue someone for incorporating a patch that you sent them for incorporation, it's not an unreasonable assumption that a judge is going to ask questions like "if you didn't want them to use your patch, why did you send it to them" and "if you didn't want your work covered under the same license as the software you submitted it to, why didn't you say so" and arrive at reasonable conclusions.
[...]Also not a lawyer, but wanted to point out that the strength of this assumption does vary somewhat from license to license too. In particular, copyleft licenses sort of try to encode it insofar as if you're violating the patch author's implicit copyright by including their derivative work into the project, then they were likely also violating the project's copyright license by distributing that modification to you under infringing terms.
The popularity of the legal workarounds you enumerated also vary somewhat by license, owing in great part to the fact that not all free/libre open source software licenses these days are purely copyright licenses: some also require patent grants, and for even longer we've had some that mandated or restricted certain uses of associated trademarks as well (thankfully not en vogue in recent years). So, depending on what additional sorts of intellectual property a license might cover, the project's legal counsel may push for stronger binding contracts to make sure the intent is clear... especially since IP like patents and trademarks tend to be jurisdiction-dependent and aren't covered by broad international convention the way copyright has been.
-- Jeremy Stanley
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